The end of suburban life is coming, writer says

Best-selling author James Kunstler speaks at UGa

Posted: Wednesday, October 22, 2008

By BLAKE AUED

Americans had better get used to the idea that, one day, they'll live more like their great, great-grandparents than their parents.

A powerful combination of depleted oil fields, climate change, population growth and financial crisis soon will conspire to change the American lifestyle drastically, according to best-selling writer James Howard Kunstler.

And any hope offered by the recent dip in oil and gas prices is false hope, Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes," said in a lecture Tuesday in the University of Georgia Chapel.

"Because the price of oil has gone down in recent weeks, the American public is once again going to get the false idea that we don't have a problem," he said. "We do have a problem, and it's a big problem."

Kunstler predicts that in the coming years Americans will be forced to give up cars, tractors and airplanes in favor of trains and pack animals, trade in Wal-Mart for backyard gardens and abandon their high-rise condos and suburban McMansions for small towns and family farms.

Encouraging car-dependent suburban sprawl - the "fiasco of suburbia" - was "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world," Kunstler said. It is becoming increasingly unsustainable as the world edges closer to "peak oil," the point of maximum extraction when reserves begin to run out and supply starts a permanent decline, he said.

That's especially true in places like Georgia, which "went hog-wild with the suburban sprawl that's now failing," he said.

An energy crisis is building, Kunstler said. Oil-producing countries like Russia and Mexico are using more of their own oil and exporting less, and others like Mexico and Great Britain are running out, he said. New oil-extracting technology or alternative fuels like solar or wind power can't possibly make up the difference, he said.

As a result, most airlines will go out of business within 36 months, he said. Farther down the road, big cities like Atlanta will contract as people flee the suburbs for rural farms and revitalized small towns. Lacking fuel to transport students or electricity to light up consolidated schools, people will begin home-schooling their children. Major state universities like UGA will shrink and become the province of the elite. Americans will need to relearn how to produce goods and grow food on a local scale, Kunstler said.

"I offer you a very stark declaration that we have to change the way we live in this country," he said. "We have to make other arrangements for daily life in a very comprehensive way."

Because much of the nation's economy is devoted to building suburban subdivisions and strip malls, the end of the suburban lifestyle will mean fewer jobs and a poorer America.

Compounding the challenge, the recent Wall Street crisis sucked trillions of dollars out of the economy that could have been used to rebuild infrastructure in preparation for the lifestyle change, Kunstler said.

"The capital for that just left in a UFO, never to be seen again," he said.

In the future, small cities like Athens, with access to water and nearby arable land, will fare best, Kunstler said. Such cities should discourage more sprawl and plan around New Urbanist principles like mixed use and walkable neighborhoods, he said.

"Emulate the best of your pre-automobile stuff and then change your codes so it's legal to build it again," he said.